


Trigger

by apparitionism



Series: Boone, et cetera [5]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Timeline, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 16:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3575664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This longer (and more serious, but I hope still rather sweet) piece also takes place in the "Together" timeline, which puts former Secret Service (but never Warehouse) agent Myka in Boone with American-accented Emily Lake, she of the amnesia. They might have an issue or two... but they might also love each other very much indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trigger

Myka doesn’t like fireworks.

Gunshots hide far too easily amongst their explosions. Myka’s never seen any statistics on this, but she would be willing to bet that there’s an uptick in protectees and agents getting themselves taken down on the fourth of damn July.

So she is extremely ambivalent about the upcoming Boone City Park fireworks display that she has tried and failed to talk Emily out of attending. They’d had no choice about going to the school’s Spring Carnival, back in April—and Myka did have to admit that that had turned out astonishingly well. Emily has argued that they owe it to their students, even to the town, to go to these big events, even ones that aren’t technically linked to the school. Further, she has argued, the fireworks are clearly The Event of the summer.

Myka wonders whether Boone has An Event for every season. She hadn’t been paying much attention to Events when she first came to this town… too much past was in her way, for one thing, and she was trying to keep up with too many second-graders as well. She does envy Emily her high-school students, even beyond the fact that she’s teaching them literature, but Emily has said that although the grass may look greener, the romantic crises _alone_ are enough to make her want to wave a wand and turn them all into second-graders. Or otters. (When she said “otters,” Myka kissed her.)

The memory of that carnival is going to be with Myka forever, of course, because of what she’d asked Emily that night, and what Emily had answered: “Of course I want to be your hot wife,” and, “but I’m afraid… oh that feels good… I’m afraid I’m not as hot as you think I am.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Myka had told her. “It’s what I think that counts, hot-wife-wise.”

Emily laughed, and it was glorious. “What about what I think? What if I wanted to be the one to ask you to be my hot wife?”

“I am really not the hot one here. Ask any of your students, they’ll set you straight.”

“Straight?” Emily had demanded. “I’d like to see them try. I’d show them you—my hot fiancée!—and dare them to try.”

So Myka is a bit shivery in anticipation of tonight. Because it can’t live up to that, can it? And then there are those unnerving fireworks. But Boone is a funny place… Myka had thought she had it substantially figured out right after she moved here, but then Emily appeared, and everything changed.

Myka’s still reasonably sure she doesn’t like fireworks. But she’s also wondering what, in Boone, will be hiding in their explosions.

****

They go to the park in the late afternoon on the fourth; it’s practically like the carnival, although with fewer rides and more picnicking. Dogs, too, and Myka feels awful for them. They’re probably going to enjoy the fireworks about as much as she is.

“Do you like dogs?” she asks Emily, around whom she has her arm.

“I have no idea,” Emily says. “I suppose I’d have to try being around some. Or maybe just one. I probably don’t _dislike_ them.”

Emily doesn’t really dislike much; Myka has never met anyone so genuinely easygoing, so overwhelmingly _nice_ about everything. Myka has actually asked her, “How do you _do_ it?” and Emily shrugged and said, “Maybe I forgot how to get angry.”

Emily knows how to be serious, and she knows how to be happy, how to be excited, how to get carried away. She knows how to get upset, too, though usually not to the point of despair. It’s only when she thinks she is being tripped up by the past, by what she can’t remember, that she becomes truly fretful. So now Myka’s wincing a bit, inside, kicking herself for asking a question that might lead to that despair.

She holds Emily closer; she leans over and kisses her cheek. “It’s okay; I wasn’t asking if we could have one. I don’t feel one way or the other about them either. Besides, one of us would have to come home at lunch to let it out, or we’d have to have a dog door, and those are security nightmares, or we’d have to take it to daycare or get a dog walker—and they’re security nightmares too—”

Emily reaches up, pulls Myka’s head toward her, and kisses her exactly right: for not too long, but just long enough to make Myka forget what she was saying. “You don’t have to try so hard,” she says. “I love that you do it, but you don’t have to.”

“I love that you do _that_ ,” Myka says. And she has never loved that from any romantic partner before, to be so openly kissed, so openly _owned_ , but this is another strangeness of Boone: that it is a small town, that she should be careful and hold to some nervousness, but she is letting it all go, faster and faster every day.

Emily is about to pull her down again, but they hear, “Hi, Ms. Lake!” and it’s two of Emily’s students—former students—and they probably shouldn’t be _quite_ so all over each other right in front of them, and Myka resents it enormously.

A girl and a boy. Clearly not a girl and a boy who are together, and Emily whispers swiftly into Myka’s ear, “Gay, the both of them,” and Myka supposes she will have to be _understanding_ as they stake their claim to their beloved Ms. Lake. That’s another advantage to Myka’s eight-year-olds: a few of them may love her, but they don’t _love_ her. Emily’s kids love her with crushes that range from the intensely platonic to the soaringly romantic, and Myka would just like to be able to stop their brains at certain points with the occasional well-placed _that’s mine, kid_.

The girl is clearly jealous of Myka— _yeah, you should be_ , says the part of Myka that is itself still a teenager—but the boy, an exceptionally pretty, cocoa-skinned, soft-eyed boy, is polite, naturally charming. “You’re Ms. Bering, right?” he says. “You teach on the elementary side.”

“I do,” Myka says, a bit more warmly than she was originally inclined to.

“I babysit a girl who was in your class. Adelaide? You gotta remember.”

He says it conspiratorially, and Myka laughs. “Nobody forgets Adelaide,” she says.

“She hasn’t forgotten you either. Look out, because I know she’s around today, and she’s gunning for you. Because everybody in town is supposed to be here, right, and you’re in town. As far as she knows. You could get away right now if you wanted to, though, you and Ms. Lake, if you run,” he assures her.

His pale, less attractive friend (Myka knows the thought is uncharitable) scowls and tries to talk to Emily about something: “—to the movies, and then—”, Myka hears as she listens with less than half an ear. She’s dropped her arm from Emily’s shoulders, but she’s still holding her hand. She really could just pull her along, just run away if she wanted to, but she sighs. “What’s your name?” she asks the lovely boy.

“I’m Tad. Hi. I…” and he’s about to say something, but he clearly can’t quite.

Myka wants to help him along. “Hi Tad,” she says. “I really appreciate that you’re, you know. Okay with this.” She raises her hand, the one joined with Emily’s, just a bit. “With… me and Emily. Ms. Lake, I mean. It means a lot.”

He brightens, beautifully, and smiles, also beautifully. His teeth are brilliant white. “Means a lot that you’re okay with it too.”

And now Myka’s embarrassed, a little. “So… are you headed to college in the fall?”

“One more year here in, um, paradise,” he says.

“Well,” Myka says. “We—I mean, Emily and I, I mean Ms. Lake and I—aren’t going anywhere. So if you need—I mean—” She should be better at this, she is sure, but… she has never really needed to be good at it. The eight-year-olds don’t care. She sighs. “It’s paradise, but not _paradise_.” Tad laughs. His laugh is slightly high, but very sweet. Myka feels pretty certain that he is officially her favorite. “So you spend time with Adelaide. That’s… taxing.”

“They pay me okay,” he says. “Bet the school never paid _you_ enough. She’s… like, she just started martial arts, so now she’s into kicking me all the time. And you know her dad’s actually really thinking about getting her that lizard she wants? Thing’ll be running for its life after ten minutes.”

“And yet…” Myka says, because she knows his tone; she heard it in her own voice, the entire school year.

“And yet, yeah,” and he laughs that sugary laugh again. “But sometimes, like, if she could just play a videogame like somebody normal. Because even if I try that, she’s all, why did that happen instead of this, and this game should totally have raccoons or some sh— I mean, some other thing like that.”

“I’ve heard the word,” Myka says. “And _I’m_ not your teacher. Worry about _this_ one.” She tries to get Emily’s attention, but Emily is deep in conversation with the girl.

“Yeah,” Tad says, “we were actually stalking you—she really wanted to talk to Ms. Lake. Some crisis.” At Myka’s expression, he goes on, “Not like somebody’s gonna _die_. Her, like, secret girlfriend broke up with her. And I don’t even know what she thinks Ms. Lake’s gonna do about it, like talk Jen into taking her back? But it was all ‘I just need Ms. Lake right now’ or some sh— I mean, thing like that.”

“Don’t they all. Or some… thing like that.”

“They kinda do. _We_ kinda do. She’s awesome.”

And Myka smiles. “Yeah. She is.”

Tad smiles too. But then his smile disappears, and a grimace replaces it, because a little girl—of course it’s Adelaide, speaking of stalkers—has just delivered a pretty solid roundhouse kick to his upper thigh.

“Tad!” she shouts. “Ms. Bering! Ms. Lake! Look, Mom! All my people in one place!” She eyes Tad’s friend suspiciously. “Who’s she,” comes the flat question.

Emily says, “She is Jordan, and she is a very good friend of your friend Tad, and of mine. I’m sure she would like to be your friend as well.”

Adelaide still looks suspicious. “Hi… Jordan,” she says, as if she’d like to follow it up with “if that’s your real name.” Then she says, to Emily, “Hi, hot girlfriend,” and slips her hand into Emily’s free one. Emily looks down at her, clearly amused.

Myka sees Amy, Adelaide’s mother, marching toward her daughter. Amy says, “And there it is. Every time I tell her that that is not something we say, she says it again. It’s like Tourette’s.” To Adelaide, she says, “Are you _trying_ to be rude to Ms. Lake and Ms. Bering? Is that your _goal_?”

“No,” Adelaide says.

“Then could we please.”

“Please what?”

“It isn’t Tourette’s after all,” Amy says. “I’m almost impressed. It’s a blind spot, and hot girlfriend is the Volkswagen driving in it.”

“But I guess out of all the things she could say, I mean, it could be worse, right?” Myka says.

Amy snorts. “It certainly could be, but I’d still rather not offend your lovely partner here.”

Emily says, “I’d think Myka would be more offended than I am. She’s the one who isn’t hot.” But she gives Myka a smile that is almost rakish.

“Oh, that’s what you think?” Myka says. She’s hard put not to just kiss Emily right here, right now, in front of her students, in front of Adelaide.

Emily leans up and says in her ear, “I’ll tell you what I think later.”

Myka glances to the side and sees the glint of green in Jordan’s eyes. _Poor kid and her breakup_ , the compassionate part of her says. But still… _this one’s mine. All mine._

“We’ve got sparklers!” Adelaide yelps. “Different colors!”

Tad shouts back, “I’ve got a lighter. Get ’em out, baby!”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Amy says to Myka and Emily, “why I let him take care of my child.”

“He’s a good boy,” Emily says. “Isn’t he, Jordan?”

“Yes, Ms. Lake.” she says.

Myka suspects that that would have been the answer to any question at all…. “Will you marry me, Jordan?” or “Will you jump off this cliff for me, Jordan?” would get exactly the same response.

Tad and Adelaide are swirling sparklers at each other; Amy is shaking her head; and Jordan clearly doesn’t know where to look.

Myka puts her arm back around Emily, children of all ages be damned. “It’s our first fourth of July together,” she says into Emily’s ear.

Emily looks up at her. “It is. And we still have some other significant firsts to look forward to.”

And Myka has given up trying to avoid sounding sentimental: “Then we get seconds. And thirds. And on and on.” Is it delirious? She doesn’t care, because Emily is beside her, and they are going to sit down on a blanket here in not too long and wait for the fireworks to start, and Myka is going to wrap her arms and her legs around this woman she loves, and this woman is going to lean back against her, and night is falling, and the humidity is rising, and there is something in the combination of damp and dark that is so, so intimate.

Myka’s chin is resting on Emily’s shoulder in front of her; if they were at home alone, her mouth would be on that shoulder, and she would be easing Emily out of her clothes. She is certain that Emily is feeling the same way, given how she is leaning back, how her fingers are woven with Myka’s, how she whispers “I love you,” and then whispers it again, in response to Myka’s breath on her neck.

But then the fireworks start, and Myka tenses.

Myka tenses, but Emily tenses too. “What’s wrong?” Myka asks her.

“The noise,” Emily says. “It’s like guns. And I don’t like guns. I think.”

Myka is fine with guns, certainly fine with one in her own hand. It’s only in other people’s hands that they’re a problem. “I’m right here,” she tries to assure Emily.

“I feel uncomfortable.” And Emily moves away from Myka, away from what Myka would have imagined would be her protection.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Yes,” Emily says, but now she’s moving even further away, very stiffly, her posture almost disdainful, and when is Emily ever disdainful?

“Okay. We’ll go home,” Myka says. She stands up and holds out her hand, and though Emily gives it a look like she’s never seen it before, she takes it.

****

Emily’s discomfort feeds on itself and grows, and it is contagious, and by the time they reach home, they are neither talking nor touching.

Emily disappears into the bathroom, and Myka hears the shower start. So she goes through her own motions: she washes her face in the other bathroom, changes into a T-shirt to sleep in, lies down on the bed. It’s so late now, it’s actually full dark. She hadn’t realized how far north Boone was until evening dusk began to stretch on and on, and she keeps meaning, now, to buy darker window shades so they can sleep until a reasonable hour in the mornings. She tries to concentrate on window shades and where she’ll go to get them and how long they’ll probably take to install and whether Emily might like a color other than white (they had seemed so nicely utilitarian when Myka first bought them, but Emily does like bright colors)…

The next thing she knows, she feels the bed move, and Emily’s there, on her own side, propped against her own pillows, damp hair up in a twist. She just sits there. She doesn’t talk, but she doesn’t move to turn her light out either.

“Once,” Myka tries, “a kid in school, in the hallway outside the admin office, popped a balloon. I reached for my weapon—obviously it wasn’t there—but I also slammed my back against a bulletin board so hard I got five bruises from pushpins. My shoulderblades looked like a weird map of an unspecified location.”

Emily looks both skeptical and sympathetic, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I almost started a petition to make the office switch over to thumbtacks.”

“Tape?” Emily offers.

“I thought of that first. Wouldn’t stick to the cork.”

“Staples.”

“That’s a good idea, but they’re not reusable.”

“They’re also not very expensive.”

Myka’s pleased to be hearing her voice, at least, but it isn’t enough. “Will you tell me what’s wrong? I mean I know what’s wrong: the fireworks upset you, and you started thinking about the past, except you can’t think about the past, because it isn’t there. Or we can just go to sleep, if you can sleep, but usually this means you can’t, so please just talk to me.”

Emily is quiet again.

“Or we could go back to talking about bulletin boards,” Myka says. “Or play cards. Or look at funny cat videos on YouTube. Or what was that one animal we saw?”

“An olingo,” Emily says.

“Right. We could go look at olingos. Or watch a movie. You probably need to start catching up so in the fall you can talk to the teenagers.”

“What if I used to be someone who would look at you and not know?”

“Um… know what?”

Emily turns her head to Myka and frowns. “You know what. What we are. What we’re supposed to be.”

“That’s pretty… romantic, coming from you.”

“I’m romantic!”

“Of course you are, in the flowers-and-candlelight sense. I meant more in the… you know, _destined_ kind of way. Because you’re generally more practical than that. More… what’s the word, there’s a better word… maybe _grounded_.”

“My being grounded doesn’t mean we weren’t destined for each other.”

“Right. But, okay, so maybe we were, but maybe it wouldn’t have worked out with me as Secret Service and you as… whoever you were before. You clearly wouldn’t have liked the fact that I carried a gun. That might’ve been the thing that sent our whole destiny spinning off its tracks. Your accident… and Sam… might have been what put things right. How can we know?”

“We could run into someone who knew me before. Someone who knows my real name, who I used to be…why my body seems to know things that I don’t. They might even know what happened when I…”

“When you what?”

“You’ve seen my body.”

“I have,” Myka says, with a small dream of a sigh that she just can’t hold back.

“I don’t mean it like that,” Emily says. She frowns again. “Or maybe I do… there’s so much more daylight now. You’ve seen me… more. More... of me. In daylight.”

“I know. It’s been… pretty wonderful.” Myka can’t keep her voice from deepening, because just saying it gives her flashes of what they did last night, of how at the start she pulled Emily’s hair free from that same loose twist that she’s been putting it up into, all summer—of what they’ve done, all summer—how just last night, just this morning, she had thought that a twist in Emily’s hair would always signify summer and light and heat and love. But the flashes fade, and now she wonders, looking at Emily, if it will make her think of destinies and how they loop and weave and if she and Emily were always bullets aiming for each other, and exactly who had been standing between them, there in the crossfire.

Emily’s expression softens. “I… it has. But—”

“Okay,” Myka says. “Okay. I know. You mean…” She reaches over and pulls Emily’s pajama top up, neither roughly nor overly smoothly, just as something she is doing. “You mean the stretch marks. I know. You were pregnant. I know it. We both know it, and we both know you don’t have a child.”

“It’s on my body. Everything I don’t know about who I was.”

“It’s on your body,” Myka says. She moves down, kisses the marks. “It’s on your body, and it’s who you were, but it isn’t the whole story. You know I have that scar on my leg, that bullet hole. Some guy shot me.”

“That’s not the whole story.”

“No. But how much more of it needs to be here with us? Some guy shot me. It was because I was doing a job, but I don’t do that job anymore.” Myka slides back up. She isn’t sure what she should do with her body now.

“But you remember doing that job! You remember what it felt like to do that job! What did I do, before? You remember what it felt like to be shot. You remember.”

“And you don’t remember what it felt like. To be pregnant,” Myka says.

“I don’t remember what it felt like. And whose child did I bear? And why? Was I not even—who was the child’s father to me? There I stood in that park today, telling a heartbroken young girl that I understand what she’s going through. I have no _idea_ what she’s going through! What if I was a cheerleader and dated the captain of the football team?”

“Then I would’ve walked down the halls every day, yearning to talk you and having no idea why it mattered so much. So see, I can’t understand what Jordan’s going through either. You know who I was with, before.”

“But you remember.”

“I remember everything. And I see that forgetting’s bad. I do see that. But remembering is… look. In high school, I didn’t have a lot of friends, but there were some other geeky girls, and we would talk and study together sometimes… but I never seemed to get it right. With any of them. And one girl… one girl, maybe, I don’t know. But there were all these things that when you put them together… and it wasn’t just one thing, it was every little detail, every one of them so clear, but grimy too, and they built into this encrusted crystal mountain, and I could see that things just weren’t the same with me on one side of that mountain and her on the other. Maybe other people would’ve been able to get beyond those things, because they’d forget them. It’d never be a mountain.” She stops. “Anyway, knowing all about your past isn’t all that great. I’d be happy to forget a lot of things.”

“You’d be happy to forget things of your choosing. You wouldn’t be happy if someone came along and just took what they wanted.”

Myka shrugs. They are sitting side by side, not touching. “I don’t know if I’d be happy. How could I know? I wouldn’t remember if I’d wanted it all gone or not. But that’s the thing: for you, it’s all clean. Nothing in most people’s lives, and definitely not in my life, is ever really clean.”

Emily cuts out her light. “Myka,” she says.

“What?” And Myka sees that this will come nowhere near a solution tonight. She cuts out her light as well.

“That mountain of crystals. All those things you remembered, that no one else would. What will we be, a year from now? Five years from now?”

It is dark, so Myka answers honestly: “I don’t know.”

****

The next morning is normal, but it is not close-normal. Myka knows there is a literally palpable difference between being together and being _together_ , and today is not italicized. Palpable, because she and Emily don’t touch. They eat breakfast and talk about their schedules; errands will take them to different parts of town. Myka leaves first, and Emily kisses her… briefly. A peck.

Myka gets home in the late afternoon to find Emily sitting outside on the back patio.

She plunks down, on the small table in front of their plastic lawn chairs, a lighter in a blister pack and a box of sparklers. “Because you didn’t get any yesterday.”

Emily looks up. “Thank you.”

Myka sits down in the other chair. “It took forever to find them. They hide them, the day after.”

“To make people forget?” Emily asks in a way that Myka can’t really read.

“Listen to me,” Myka tells her. “Please. You know exactly what to say to those kids. Anything they ask, you know what to say, and they love you for it. So you may not remember what you did, what you went through—or maybe you really were homecoming queen and everything was perfect—but you know enough to make them feel better. She broke up with her secret girlfriend, and she knew you’d help her.”

“Only because she has a crush on me.”

Myka shakes her head. “Not only that. How’d she get that crush on you in the first place?”

Emily smiles, but it’s sardonic, and it fits her face but doesn’t. “Well, you say I’m hot.”

“Adelaide says you’re hot. I say… I say I never met anybody like you.”

“Anybody with amnesia.”

“Emily.”

“That isn’t even my name.”

“It doesn’t matter what your name is. Maybe I should call you baby, or honey, so it wouldn’t matter at all what name somebody decided to give you,” Myka says. “I can’t take the amnesia away. I can’t take that away, and I can’t give you anything back. I can’t give you your memories back, and I can’t give you your child back, if you ever even had her, or had him. If I had a time machine, I would use it, just use it and go back, because you want to know so bad.”

“No matter what you thought we’d find?”

“I love you,” Myka says. “Watch.” She lights a sparkler, and once the initial, brightest fizz fades, she swings it slowly around. Circles. Figure eights. Infinities. The trails persist, then fade. “This is all I’ve given you so far, all you’ve given me.  If that was all, if it was enough, tell me now, and some noise, some light, that’s what we had, and it’s over. Not like gunshots at all. Otherwise…”

“Your leg?”

“My leg. Your body. One way or another, Emily.”

Emily leans to the table, takes a sparkler from the box. She reaches behind her head with her other hand and shakes her hair free of its twist. She takes up the lighter, holds it to the gray batter at the sparkler’s end. It begins to blaze and flicker. “It doesn’t sound like a gun.”

Long minutes pass. Both sparklers burn down to trails of smoke.

Myka looks over at Emily. She stands, goes and stands over Emily, runs fingers through her hair, touches her face, feels Emily’s face turn to fit her palm as her fingers caress Emily’s ear. She won’t tell Emily what to do. But she will tell her, with her touch, now with her mouth as she leans down and kisses Emily, feels Emily rise as she always does to meet that kiss, what she _wants_ Emily to do.

Emily stands, and now she’s the one pushing, and Myka almost loses her balance, almost falls backwards onto the grass of their backyard. Emily steadies her. She looks up with those serious eyes, those eyes Myka can’t see through. “Can we stay home next year?” Emily asks.

Myka gathers her close. “We can stay home. We’ll tell everyone that we just don’t like fireworks.” She kisses Emily, whose mouth hesitates, then opens. When they part, Myka asks, “Except for this kind?” Her hands have found their way back to Emily’s hair.

Emily nods, and Myka feels it in her fingers. It’s too simple, these words they’re saying, but what she feels in her fingers isn’t simple at all. “Except for this kind.”

END


End file.
